Album Reviews
Lunatic Soul
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Let’s get something straight. I don’t have a man-crush on Mariusz Duda per se… I mean, yes, I happen to love every album he’s had a hand in. And yes, I did travel 10 hrs each way to meet him at Riverside’s first non-feastival show in the US. And so what, I would have made that travel for just the show. You can also ignore the fact that I was practically speechless during our interview with Mariusz.
Mariusz is the lead singer in Riverside and contributed some vocals to a couple tracks for the primarily instrumental E.P. by Indukti. More recently, he started his own side-project, Lunatic Soul, and released a self-titled album this past October. I didn’t buy it right away based on what little I heard on the MySpace page. It’s not what I expected based on Riverside and Indukti. But then it occurred to me… if it was what I should expect based on those two bands, then it wouldn’t be a side-project. Since Mariusz hasn’t let me down before, I actually purchased Lunatic Soul somewhat blindly, which isn’t all that uncommon for me. Sometimes I just get good hunches, and I’m rarely wrong with them.
Lunatic Soul is far more mellow than Indukti and even more so than Riverside… in a way. The majority of the album is very light with respect to percussion. There often is no percussion at all or it’s kept in the background or it’s right in center of attention. This may sound like a tautology, but it’s really quite different from the percussion you’d hear in Riverside or Indukti. But I think the purpose of this album was an outlet for Mariusz’s more personal material to be expressed in his sole choice of artistic expression rather than writing music as a collective unit in a band. That’s just an assumption, but seems right based on what you’ll hear in Riverside and what I got out of our interview.
This album is a little more experimental than I usually favor… and by experimental I mean the actual use of the word rather than it’s genre related connotation. There is little conformity to the canonical song structures and there is a bit of a variety of instruments. Influences seem a little more wide spread… I swear, sometimes I hear glimpses of The Beetles, Supertramp, and even Sting. They’re subtle, and might just be me being crazy. Overall, the album gives a dark singer/song-writer vibe for the most part, which explains the image used in this post. Since this was his solo project, he had a bit more freedom in arrangement decisions (e.g. having little to no percussion for extended periods of time). I’ve only had the chance to really listen to this album with my full attention 3 or 4 times, but I know it will continue to grow on me. I just wish I could give a better description to convince others… this is a very unique album.
Related Posts: Interview with Mariusz Duda | Riverside | Indukti | Supertramp
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